This was the year that prose turned purple, binge viewing trumped appointment television, and “Scandal” took the place of “Breaking Bad” as the hot drama everyone wanted to talk about. Television is still in a golden age, but the best of 2013 looked a little brassy, more Aaron Spelling than Aaron Sorkin.

Netflix offered a version of “Scandal” in ‘House of Cards,’ a Washington soap opera for the downloading elite that was more sleek and sophisticated on the surface but was really just as juicy and lowbrow as Shonda Rhimes’s drama on ABC.

And in its third season, ‘Scandal’ kept a straight face through a nuclear proliferation of preposterous plot twists. The government misdeeds in this amped-up melodrama are so dire and so bountiful they could fill a “Twelve Days of Christmas” carol (seven assassins stabbing, six senators sexting, five golden stings). The writing is just as extreme: characters declaim in identical overwrought rants.

ABC, not surprisingly, doubled down on schlock and awe. The second season of ‘Revenge,’ which is set in the Hamptons and is supposedly based on the Dumas novel “The Count of Monte Cristo,” mostly seemed infused by Montecristo cigars. ‘Nashville,’ a variation on “Dynasty” set in the world of country-western music, also made some noise.

On the other hand, there was a deadly silence surrounding the network’s more solemn, slow-moving drama, ‘Betrayal.’ That show took marital infidelity much more seriously and was a big bore. ABC has decided to replace it in January with “Killer Women,” a procedural about a sexy Texas Ranger (and former pageant winner) who hunts down women wanted for murder.

The profusion of flashy escapist shows all but drowned out more sober and high-minded options. Although the audience grew some, viewers didn’t embrace the virtue and verbal virtuosity of ‘The Newsroom’ on HBO, even after Mr. Sorkin fine-tuned his characters for the second season.

There wasn’t much more patience for artsy, self-serious crime dramas like ‘Low Winter Sun,’ on AMC, ‘Ray Donovan’ on Showtime or, on Sundance, Jane Campion’s slow-moving thriller ‘Top of the Lake.’ Cable and Internet networks are slower to admit defeat than the broadcast networks. ‘The Killing,’ which staggered through a third season on AMC, should have gotten axed but instead has won a fourth season and yet another chance on Netflix. Yet another adaptation of a cult Scandinavian drama, the turgid FX show ‘The Bridge,’ was renewed for a second season.

Film noir paled to ashen gray and was shown up by ‘Orange Is the New Black.’ This Netflix original series became the new de rigueur crime-doesn’t-pay show, even though it is not nearly as grim and complex as ‘Breaking Bad,’ which ended its five-season run on AMC in one last apocalyptic blood bath. “Orange Is the New Black” is a frisky semi-comical drama about a pretty, blond, middle-class woman who is put behind bars and consorts with less genteel inmates — “Clueless” goes correctional.

Photo

Claire Danes in “Homeland.”Credit
Kent Smith/Showtime

In its fifth season, ‘The Good Wife’ picked up fresh steam, mostly by favoring office politics over gubernatorial campaigns: Alicia (Julianna Margulies) defected from Lockhart/Gardner to form her own firm, taking some prized clients with her and leaving behind an angry and vengeful former lover, Will (Josh Charles). This show started out as a fictionalized reinterpretation of the Eliot Spitzer scandal but has found its own course as a legal drama spiced with lots of sex and heavy breathing.

The “Scandal”-ization of prime time extended even to ‘Homeland.’ The Showtime espionage thriller, starring Claire Danes as Carrie, a bipolar C.I.A. officer, is so somber and forbidding that it kept Carrie’s lover, Brody (Damian Lewis), off-screen and out of her way for much of the season. Yet for all the repression and restraint, even that series turned a little sudsy at times. The show found plenty of time for family melodrama, particularly in the teenage sulking of Brody’s daughter.

Mostly, the real holdouts were in the fantasy and horror fields. ‘Game of Thrones’ on HBO didn’t melt into happy-ever-after clinches or clichés, and neither did ‘American Horror Story’ on FX.

Pop-culture physics requires an equal and opposite reaction to any forceful new trend. And this year, the strongest antidote to “Scandal” was the fourth season of ‘The Walking Dead.’ On that harrowing, dystopian AMC series, tormented humans scramble to survive and it’s the insentient zombies who enjoy the pleasures of the flesh.

A version of this article appears in print on December 15, 2013, on Page AR19 of the New York edition with the headline: I Want It Steamy, and I Want It Now. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe